Houston reacts to Supreme Court decision on Trump's travel ban

Updated 4:02 pm, Monday, June 26, 2017

In this Feb. 3, 2017, photo, President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

In this Feb. 3, 2017, photo, President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, STF

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Demonstrators protest against President Donald Trump's executive orders on immigration at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2017, in Houston. Sunday's events continue a weekend of unrest in Houston and around the country as federal officials closed the border, blocking families from reuniting in the U.S. and refugees resettling around the country. less

Demonstrators protest against President Donald Trump's executive orders on immigration at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2017, in Houston. Sunday's events continue a weekend of unrest ... more

Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle

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President Donald Trump speaks at a rally Wednesday in Nashville, Tenn. During his speech Trump promised to repeal and replace Obamacare and also criticized the decision by a federal judge in Hawaii that halted the latest version of the travel ban. (Photo by Andrea Morales/Getty Images) less

President Donald Trump speaks at a rally Wednesday in Nashville, Tenn. During his speech Trump promised to repeal and replace Obamacare and also criticized the decision by a federal judge in Hawaii that halted ... more

Photo: Andrea Morales, Stringer

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Protesters assemble at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017 after two Iraqi refugees were detained while trying to enter the country. On Friday, Jan. 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending all immigration from countries with terrorism concerns for 90 days. Countries included in the ban are Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, which are all Muslim-majority nations. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle) less

Protesters assemble at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017 after two Iraqi refugees were detained while trying to enter the country. On Friday, Jan. 27, President Donald ... more

Photo: Craig Ruttle, Associated Press

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Nadia Hanan Madalo, center, hugs her brother Gassan Kakooz at the airport after arriving from Iraq Wednesday, March 15, 2017, in San Diego. Madalo and her family, refugees forced to flee their town of Batnaya, Iraq, after the Islamic State invaded and destroyed it several years ago, arrived in San Diego to be reunited with Madalo's siblings and mother. As they flew to the U.S. on Wednesday, a federal judge in Hawaii put a hold on President Trump's newest ban - the latest development in a fight between the administration and the courts that has injected more uncertainty into the lives of refugees. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull) less

Nadia Hanan Madalo, center, hugs her brother Gassan Kakooz at the airport after arriving from Iraq Wednesday, March 15, 2017, in San Diego. Madalo and her family, refugees forced to flee their town of Batnaya, ... more

Photo: Gregory Bull, STF

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Trump travel ban transition

Trump travel ban transition

Photo: Houston Chronicle

Houston reacts to Supreme Court decision on Trump's travel ban

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The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that President Donald Trump's contentious travel ban should go into effect ahead of a full hearing, though they limited its scope.

In its brief ruling, the court said the ban could not apply to foreigners with a "bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States" such as a relative, job offer or university admission.

Here are Houston voices in reaction:

Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of the Houston branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Monday's ruling "hasn't changed anything. We're still not happy about the ban itself. So different phases of it don't make us happy unless they just cancel it altogether."

"We don't like it, and there never should have been a travel ban," Carroll said. "It does nothing to make us safer."

"This is a significant decision that I didn't expect and most people didn't expect," said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law-Houston. "This is a pretty big victory for the Trump Administration."

Blackman, speaking on a conference call hosted by the conservative Federalist Society, added that he was surprised there were no dissents from Democratic appointees. He noted that, unlike the lower courts and appeals courts, the Supreme Court justices did not weigh Trump's campaign rhetoric, Twitter posts and public interviews that lower-court judges said revealed a biased motive.

The leader of a major refugee resettlement agency in the region reacted negatively to the news about the order, which includes a 120-day pause of all refugee resettlement.

"We're disappointed in the decision today," said Martin B. Cominsky, CEO of Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, "but we respect the decision of the Supreme Court. We hope that the hearing in October will allow all parties to express their points of view in a more compassionate way, and to consider our responsibility as a world leader in the resettlement of refugees."

"We feel for the refugees who are waiting years to come to the United States as a safe haven for them and their families. We'll be looking to any eligible family-reunification cases that are exempted from the travel ban," Cominsky added. "At this point we can only be prayerful and look to the compassion of other countries ... that continue this work in refugee resettlement."

The CEO said the interfaith organization would redouble efforts to help already-arrived refugees become citizens, and to build support for tolerance and acceptance through their "Respect Thy Neighbor" program, which is funded by the private Houston Endowment.

Institutions in the Texas Medical Center have previously expressed concern about how the travel ban affects its employees, researchers and others.

On Monday, Baylor College of Medicine general counsel Bob Corrigan released this statement:

"We are heartened that the Supreme Court's order protects our faculty and students who hold green cards or otherwise have a bona fide relationship with the College. That was our primary concern with the original order. However, there remains a concern about the impact the executive order will have on the ability of the College to continue to recruit and retain the best and brightest students and faculty going forward. We will closely follow updates on this case."

Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist, said universities that opposed the executive orders likely would not be fully satisfied even though students won an exemption.

"A near-universal view among the universities is that this resolves the bureaucratic concern that students would not be allowed to attend universities here in the United States," he said. "But it does limit (those students') travel, which they view as discriminatory and not in what they consider the best interests of the United States."

Jones said the ruling was largely a victory for the Trump Administration.

"This legitimates the ban, at least in part. And (it) reinforces claims made by the president that the appeals courts were effectively incorrect. ... Opponents of the ban are going to be upset because while there's going to be a carve-out, the Supreme Court has said that at least temporarily the ban will apply to people who don't have a bona fide relationship. ... From a political optics perspective, the decision benefits Trump."

He also theorized about how the decision was crafted.

"This was clearly a compromise decision between one group of justices that wanted to reinstate the ban, and another group of justices that wanted to keep it from going into effect in any form whatsoever. What they've come up with is a compromise: Anyone who has a legitimate relationship ... will not have to be enforced. The ban has been reinstated, but they've carved out a major exception."

A leader of a local Muslim group emphasized that many Muslims here and abroad see the ban as intentionally targeting people based on their religion, citing Trump's campaign rhetoric about a ban on visiting Muslims.

"We encourage the government to rule based on justice, not religious discrimination," said Dr. Amir Malik, a neurosurgeon who leads the Houston-South chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. "A lot of it unfortunately has to do with what we feel is religious discrimination against the countries. In the past few years, most of the terrorist acts that have happened, none of the terrorists were from any of these countries. ... That underscores the fact that just having a religious litmus test for a ban obviously does nothing to protect us. ... We believe extreme vettting is better than a religious test (and) we feel that that kind of vetting is already going on in the immigration system."

However, a national advocacy group that pushes for strict enforcement of immigration laws contested the idea of a religious bias.

"It was a much-needed temporary timeout to give us a chance to examine our vetting system to make sure that those who are coming to attack the nation or hurt innocent Americans will be prevented," said Dave Ray, a Federation for American Immigration Reform spokesman. Ray said the vast majority of the world's Muslims live outside the six restricted countries, and that the freeze affects non-Muslims in those six countries as well.

"This is a national security step that was much-needed," Ray added. "It's sad that one federal judge who has no access to national security briefings was able to trip this up for a number of months while possibly questionable people from these countries were allowed to enter the country. ... The president of the United States, whoever that person is at that time, is the only person who has access to daily security briefings from the national intelligence agencies. Not the courts."